When I saw Elaine after Belle died, she reminded me that we here had only known Belle in the last ten years of her life, and that she had lived a full life before then. I realized that Belle lived such a full life here that I really knew relatively little about her times before she moved to the Coast. So when I got together with Elaine, David and Marina, Hyla, Alan and Karolyn, I was excited to learn more about Belle's experiences earlier in her life.
She was born in Brooklyn, the second-youngest of eight. The family moved when Belle was fairly young, around age eight, to a farm called Turkey Hill in rural Haddon, Connecticut. It seems her father was not healthy, and it was thought that the farm would be good for him -- even though "of course it almost killed him," said Hyla. It was a place where you had to haul coal and pump water. Belle remembered being picked up from the one-room schoolhouse occasionally in a horse-drawn sleigh and picking mulberries. Belle's parents were Yiddish-speaking orthodox Jews. Belle remembered never staying awake to the end of a seder that her father conducted -- Alan remembers the same!
As a young woman Belle fell in love with a non-Jewish man. Her mother forbade her to marry him. Belle didn't, but she left and came to California with her friend Sylvia Diamond. Here's something I didn't know about Belle -- she and Sylvia worked on a dude ranch in Solvang for two years. Family responsibilities eventually brought her back to Connecticut -- her sister Esther was ill with a long illness, and Belle cared for her. She settled in Connecticut, where she married and had Elaine, Hyla and Alan.
Belle was a founding member of the synagogue in Deep River CT and its unpaid secretary for twenty years. She was also "a supermom before the word was invented," says Hyla. She made all the kids' birthday cakes. She had all the family circles at their house -- there were relatives in town every weekend at least. And she worked the whole time outside the home as well. Belle and her husband ran a grocery store. When the big chain supermarkets started coming into town their business closed. She worked as a school secretary and then as a Purchasing Agent for the state of Connecticut. She was responsible for acquiring the food and small appliances for all the schools, prisons and other institutions in the State. It was a responsible job. She was one of relatively few women in the workforce above the secretarial level at that time, and at times she had to fight for equal pay and such. Elaine said, "She knew how to set limits when she had to."
She was also -- this won't surprise anyone -- an avid synagogue volunteer. In addition to being the secretary she helped organize the Purim plays, collected names each year for the Yizkor memorial book and ran yard sales for the synagogue (which her children point out was "an addiction" as well as a service!) Hyla recalls than when she was a Candy Striper in the local hospital, at about age fourteen, while she was waiting to be picked up each time so many people would stop her and say, "You're Belle's Daughter! Tell her hello!" that it drove her a bit crazy.
Belle had a difficult marriage, and it ended about twenty years ago. At that time she went to Israel for the first time. She went for four months, and she worked as a volunteer, I believe on a kibbutz, in Netanya. She worked with children there, releasing a kibbutz member to do more skilled military work. She loved her time there and commented that there was no language barrier with the children.
On a subsequent trip to Israel she met Aaron Rodkin and his wife, and they struck up a friendship. Later on she heard that Aaron's wife had died, and she sent a condolence note. This led to Aaron visiting when he was traveling in New England and to Aaron and Belle falling deeply in love. He moved to Connecticut and they married. "He would do anything for her -- which was quite different than what she had been used to…" Eight months after they married, he fell ill and died.
After Aaron's death Belle moved to Fort Bragg. When she arrived here, she said, "It took me forty years to get back to California!" And here I can begin to tell some things that I know myself, though I am sure that I only know the tiniest fraction of all that Belle did while she lived here. Here too she was an avid synagogue volunteer. When she first moved here, we didn't have any way to welcome newcomers to the Jewish community. So, rather than complaining that she wasn't welcomed properly, she volunteered to start a welcome wagon for Jewish people new to the community. She was a newcomer herself! Elaine tells that one of Belle's very first outings when she moved here was to help out at one of MCJC's few rummage sales. She came back a few hours later and said, "Well, I met a new friend" -- that was Bonnie Sarrow -- "and we made plans to do such and such…" "She was like that," says Elaine.
I would call on Belle to do all sorts of things that not everybody would do -- to visit people when they were sick, to cook for people. There were several times when people were ill for months or years at a stretch, and Belle was one of the people who would bring them food every week. She reached out on her own as well to all sorts of people, to be of service to them when they were in need. I know that she was a volunteer at the hospital. [[At the funeral Rachel Binah said that as her mother, Eleanor, was dying, Belle would bring food regularly. When Eleanor could no longer eat, she would still eat Belle's carrot soup. After Eleanor died, Belle continued to bring gifts of food to Rachel's father. The principal of Redwood Elementary School stood up and talked about how Belle volunteered regularly in the Head Start classroom. Murry Ross spoke of how Belle invited him to recover from heart surgery in her home. "I barely knew here before that, except as someone to say 'hi' to," said Murry.]
Several months ago Belle went East to help Hyla move to Boston. While visiting with friends in Connecticut she had a major stroke. She was hospitalized and then in a rehabilitation hospital in Connecticut for several months. During that time many of her friends visited her, even friends she hadn't seen in twenty or thirty years. People would hear that Belle was in the hospital and would come to see her. She received 150 get-well cards while she was recovering in Connecticut, and she wished that she could respond with a thank you note for every one of them. Just about Belle's last wish, say her children, was to come home to Fort Bragg, and she succeeded with their help in doing this. Here too she was able to connect with many of the important people in her life -- though I know that many others wanted to see her and she wasn't able to visit with everyone she would have wished to. Still, "imagine receiving all that adoration at the end of your life," says Elaine. As she began to feel better, she started to want to spend some time alone, and she used some of that very first time alone in her home to die. She died at Neila, at the very end of Yom Kippur, just as the heavenly gates were closing. She slipped through them.
Here are some things her children said about Belle:
Elaine said that Belle "wouldn't overlook anybody, even people who might be overlooked at other times."
Hyla said that she never heard an unkind tone of voice from her mother. I had to ask her about this -- your mother? "That's right." The kids once broke a crystal bowl that had belonged to Belle's mother, and they saw her cry that one time. But they never heard her speak to them or anyone else unkindly.
Elaine says that the absolutely only thing Belle wasn't totally generous about was sharing her recipes! She even called Elaine once to see if she could give a recipe of Elaine's (for spinach balls) to a friend. Elaine realized than that there is a kind of secret society of cooks and recipe-holders, and that her mother was a part of that circle.
Marina said, "She was, you know, a grandmother!"
All of her children said that Belle was private with her sorrows and generous with her joys. She had a lot of loss and deprivation in her life, but she never stopped delighting -- in her family, in everyone she knew, and especially in her grandchildren, Olivia, Nathan and Marina. They were the great joy of her life. Elaine, Hyla nad Alan all agree that the days of the birth of their own children, and the weekend of Olivia's bat mitzvah in Atlanta a few years ago, were the happiest days of Belle's life.
To me, Belle was a true hero, someone who succeeded in living out what she believed in very completely, which is about the best thing you can say about a human life. There is a legend that hidden here and there in the world at any given time there are thirty-six just people. I don't know for sure that Belle was one of them, but I have always imagined that they would be people like Belle. I am so glad that we all had the opportunity to spend part of Belle's life with her, that she chose our community to live in. I feel like we were all truly lucky and blessed to have known her.
© 2002 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Updated 08/29/2002 (rge)